The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen

by Steven Erikson

  In another, two wolves seemed to be watching him from a weathered ridge of grasses and bony outcrops. Guarded, uneasy, as if measuring a rival. Behind them, rain slanted down from heavy clouds. And he found himself turning away, as if indifferent to their regard, to walk across a denuded plain. In the distance, dolmens of some sort rose from the ground, scores of them, arranged without any discernible order, and yet all seemed identical—perhaps statues, then. He drew closer, frowning at the shapes, so oddly surmounted by jutting cowls, their hunched, narrow backs to him, tails curled round. The ground they crouched on glittered as if strewn with diamonds or crushed glass.

  Even as he closed in on these silent, motionless sentinels, moments from reaching the nearest one, a heavy shadow slipped over him and the air was suddenly frigid. In wrought despair, he halted, looked up.

  Nothing but stars, each one drifting as if snapped from its tether, like motes of dust on a slowly draining pool. Faint voices sinking down, touching his brow like flecks of snow, melting in the instant, all meaning lost. Arguments in the Abyss, but he understood none of them. To stare upward was to reel, unbalanced, and he felt his feet lift from the earth until he floated. Twisting round, he looked down.

  More stars, but emerging from their midst a dozen raging suns of green fire, slashing through the black fabric of space, fissures of light bleeding through. The closer they came, the more massive they grew, blinding him to all else, and the maelstrom of voices rose to a clamour, and what had once felt like flakes of snow, quickly melting upon his heated brow, now burned like fire.

  If he could but draw close the fragments, make the mosaic whole, and so comprehend the truth of the patterns. If he could—

  Swirls. Yes, they are that. The motion does not deceive, the motion reveals the shape beneath.

  Swirls, in curls of fur.

  Tattoos—see them now—see them!

  All at once, as the tattoos settled into place, he knew himself.

  I am Heboric Ghost Hands. Destriant to a cast-down god. I see him—

  I see you, Fener.

  The shape, so massive, so lost. Unable to move.

  His god was trapped, and, like Heboric, was mute witness to the blazing jade suns as they bore down. He and his god were in their path, and these were forces that could not be pushed aside. No shield existed solid enough to block what was coming.

  The Abyss cares nothing for us. The Abyss comes to deliver its own arguments, against which we cannot stand.

  Fener, I have doomed you. And you, old god, you have doomed me.

  Yet, I no longer regret. For this is as it should be. After all, war knows no other language. In war we invite our own destruction. In war we punish our children with a broken legacy of blood.

  He understood now. The gods of war and what they meant, what their very existence signified. And as he stared upon those jade suns searing ever closer, he was overwhelmed by the futility hiding behind all this arrogance, this mindless conceit.

  See us wave our banners of hate.

  See where it gets us.

  A final war had begun. Facing an enemy against whom no defence was possible. Neither words nor deeds could fool this clear-eyed arbiter. Immune to lies, indifferent to excuses and vapid discourses on necessity, on the weighing of two evils and the facile righteousness of choosing the lesser one—and yes, these were the arguments he was hearing, empty as the ether they travelled.

  We stood tall in paradise. And then called forth the gods of war, to bring destruction down upon ourselves, our world, the very earth, its air, its water, its myriad life. No, show me no surprise, no innocent bewilderment. I see now with the eyes of the Abyss. I see now with my enemy’s eyes, and so I shall speak with its voice.

  Behold, my friends, I am justice.

  And when at last we meet, you will not like it.

  And if irony awakens in you at the end, see me weep with these tears of jade, and answer with a smile.

  If you’ve the courage.

  Have you, my friends, the courage?

  Book One

  The Sea Does Not

  Dream of You

  I will walk the path forever walked

  One step ahead of you

  And one step behind

  I will choke in the dust of your passing

  And skirl more into your face

  It all tastes the same

  Even when you feign otherwise

  But here on the path forever walked

  The old will lie itself anew

  We can sigh like kings

  Like empresses on gift-carts

  Resplendent in imagined worth.

  I will walk the path forever walked

  Though my time is short

  As if the stars belong

  Cupped here in my hands

  Showering out these pleasures

  That so sparkle in the sun

  When down they drift settling flat

  To make this path forever walked

  Behind you behind me

  Between the step past, the step to come

  Look up look up once

  Before I am gone

  TELLER OF TALES

  FASSTAN OF KOLANSE

  Chapter One

  Abject misery lies not in what the blanket reveals, but in what it hides.

  KING TEHOL THE ONLY OF LETHER

  War had come to the tangled, overgrown grounds of the dead Azath tower in the city of Letheras. Swarms of lizards had invaded from the river’s shoreline. Discovering a plethora of strange insects, they began a feeding frenzy.

  Oddest among the arcane bugs was a species of two-headed beetle. Four lizards spied one such creature and closed in, surrounding it. The insect noted threats from two directions and made a careful half-turn, only to find two additional threats, whereupon it crouched down and played dead.

  This didn’t work. One of the lizards, a wall-scampering breed with a broad mouth and gold-flecked eyes, lunged forward and gobbled up the insect.

  This scene was played out throughout the grounds, a terrible slaughter, a rush to extinction. The fates, this evening, did not appear kind to the two-headed beetles.

  Not all prey, however, was as helpless as it might initially seem. The role of the victim in nature is ephemeral, and that which is fed upon might in time feed upon the feeders in the eternal drama of survival.

  A lone owl, already engorged on lizards, was the sole witness to the sudden wave of writhing deaths on the rumpled earth below, as from the mouths of dying lizards, grotesque shapes emerged. The extinction of the two-headed beetles proved not as imminent a threat as it had seemed only moments earlier.

  But owls, being among the least clever of birds, are unmindful of such lessons. This one watched, wide-eyed and empty. Until it felt a strange stirring in its own gut, sufficient to distract it from the wretched dying below, that array of pale lizard bellies blotting the dark ground. It did not think of the lizards it had eaten. It did not take note, even in retrospect, of the sluggish efforts some of them had displayed at escaping its swooping talons.

  The owl was in for a long night of excruciating regurgitation. Dimwitted as it was, from that moment on and for ever more, lizards were off its menu.

  The world delivers its lessons in manners subtle or, if required, cruel and blunt, so that even the thickest of subjects will comprehend. Failing that, they die. For the smart ones, of course, incomprehension is inexcusable.

  ______

  A night of heat in Letheras. Stone dripped sweat. The canals looked viscid, motionless, the surface strangely flattened and opaque with swirls of dust and rubbish. Insects danced over the water as if seeking their reflections, but this smooth patina yielded nothing, swallowing up the span of stars, devouring the lurid torchlight of the street patrols, and so the winged insects spun without surcease, as though crazed with fever.

  Beneath a bridge, on stepped banks buried in darkness, crickets crawled like droplets of oozing oil, glistening, turgid, haplessly crunched underfo
ot as two figures drew together and huddled in the gloom.

  ‘He never would’ve went in,’ one of them said in a hoarse whisper. ‘The water reeks, and look, no ripples, no nothing. He’s scarpered to the other side, somewhere in the night market where he can get lost fast.’

  ‘Lost,’ grunted the other, a woman, lifting up the dagger in one gloved hand and examining the edge, ‘that’s a good one. Like he could get lost. Like any of us could.’

  ‘You think he can’t wrap himself up like we done?’

  ‘No time for that. He bolted. He’s on the run. Panicked.’

  ‘Looked like panic, didn’t it,’ agreed her companion, and then he shook his head. ‘Never seen anything so . . . disappointing.’

  The woman sheathed her dagger. ‘They’ll flush him out. He’ll come back across, and we jump him then.’

  ‘Stupid, thinking he could get away.’

  After a few moments, Smiles unsheathed her dagger again, peered at the edge.

  Beside her, Throatslitter rolled his eyes but said nothing.

  Bottle straightened, gestured for Koryk to join him, then watched, amused, as the broad-shouldered half-blood Seti shoved and elbowed his way through the crowd, leaving a wake of dark glares and bitten-off curses—there was little risk of trouble, of course, since clearly the damned foreigner was looking for just that, and instincts being what they were the world over, no one was of a mind to take on Koryk.

  Too bad. It’d be a thing worth seeing, Bottle smiled to himself, if a mob of irate Letherii shoppers descended on the glowering barbarian, pummelling him into the ground with loaves of crusty bread and bulbous root-crops.

  Then again, such distractions wouldn’t do. Not right now, anyway, when they’d found their quarry, with Tarr and Corabb moving round back of the tavern to cover the alley bolt-hole, and Maybe and Masan Gilani up on the roof by now, in case their target got imaginative.

  Koryk arrived, in a sweat, scowling and grinding his teeth. ‘Miserable turds,’ he muttered. ‘What’s with this lust to spend coin? Markets are stupid.’

  ‘Keeps people happy,’ said Bottle, ‘or if not exactly happy, then . . . temporarily satiated. Which serves the same function.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Keeping them outa trouble. The disruptive kind of trouble,’ he added, seeing Koryk’s knotted forehead, his darting eyes. ‘The kind that comes when a population finds the time to think, really think, I mean—when they start realizing what a piece of shit all this is.’

  ‘Sounds like one of the King’s speeches—they put me to sleep, like you’re doing right now, Bottle. Where exactly is he, then?’

  ‘One of my rats is crouching at the foot of a banister—’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Baby Smiles—she’s the best for this. Anyway, she’s got her beady eyes fixed right on him. He’s at a table in the corner, just under a shuttered window—but it doesn’t look like the kind anyone could actually climb through. Basically,’ Bottle concluded, ‘he’s cornered.’

  Koryk’s frown deepened. ‘That’s too easy, isn’t it?’

  Bottle scratched at his stubble, shifted from one foot to the other, and then sighed. ‘Aye, way too easy.’

  ‘Here come Balm and Gesler.’

  The two sergeants arrived.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ Balm asked, eyes wide.

  Gesler said, ‘He’s in his funk again, never mind him. We got us a fight ahead, I figure. A nasty one. He won’t go down easy.’

  ‘What’s the plan, then?’ Koryk asked.

  ‘Stormy leads the way. He’s going to spring him loose—if he heads for the back door your friends will take him down. Same for if he goes up. My guess is, he’ll dodge round Stormy and try for the front door—that’s what I’d do. Stormy’s huge and mean but he ain’t fast. And that’s what we’re counting on. The four of us will be waiting for the bastard—we’ll take him down. With Stormy coming up behind him and holding the doorway to stop any retreat.’

  ‘He’s looking nervous and in a bad mood in there,’ Bottle said. ‘Warn Stormy—he just might stand and fight.’

  ‘We hear a scrap start and in we go,’ said Gesler.

  The gold-hued sergeant went off to brief Stormy. Balm stood beside Koryk, looking bewildered.

  People were rolling in and out of the tavern like it was a fast brothel. Stormy then appeared, looming over almost everyone else, his visage red and his beard even redder, as if his entire face was aflame. He tugged loose the peace-strap on his sword as he lumbered towards the door. Seeing him, people scattered aside. He met one more customer at the threshold and took hold of the man by the front of his shirt, then threw him into his own wake—the poor fool yelped as he landed face first on the cobbles not three paces from the three Malazans, where he writhed, hands up at his bloodied chin.

  As Stormy plunged into the tavern, Gesler arrived, stepping over the fallen citizen, and hissed, ‘To the door now, all of us, quick!’

  Bottle let Koryk take the lead, and held back even for Balm who almost started walking the other way—before Gesler yanked the man back. If there was going to be a scrap, Bottle preferred to leave most of the nasty work to the others. He’d done his job, after all, in tracking and finding the quarry.

  Chaos erupted in the tavern, furniture crashing, startled shouts and terrified screams. Then something went thump! And all at once white smoke was billowing out from the doorway. More splintering furniture, a heavy crash, and then a figure sprinted out from the smoke.

  An elbow cracked hard on Koryk’s jaw and he toppled like a tree.

  Gesler ducked a lashing fist, just in time to meet an upthrust knee, and the sound the impact made was of two coconuts in collision. The quarry’s leg spun round, taking the rest of the man with it in a wild pirouette, whilst Gesler rocked back to promptly sit down on the cobbles, his eyes glazed.

  Shrieking, Balm back-stepped, reaching for his short sword—and Bottle leapt forward to pin the sergeant’s arm—as the target lunged past them all, running hard but unevenly for the bridge.

  Stormy stumbled out from the tavern, his nose streaming blood. ‘You didn’t get him? You damned idiots—look at my face! I took this for nothing!’

  Other customers pushed out round the huge Falari, eyes streaming and coughing.

  Gesler was climbing upright, wobbly, shaking his head. ‘Come on,’ he mumbled, ‘let’s get after him, and hope Throatslitter and Smiles can slow him down some.’

  Tarr and Corabb showed up and surveyed the scene. ‘Corabb,’ said Tarr, ‘stay with Koryk and try bringing him round.’ And then he joined Bottle, Gesler, Stormy and Balm as they set out after their target.

  Balm glared across at Bottle. ‘I coulda had him!’

  ‘We need the fool alive, you idiot,’ snapped Bottle.

  The sergeant gaped. ‘We do?’

  ‘Look at that,’ hissed Throatslitter. ‘Here he comes!’

  ‘Limping bad, too,’ observed Smiles, sheathing her dagger once more. ‘We come up both sides and go for his ankles.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  Throatslitter went left, Smiles went right, and they crouched at either end of the landing on this side of the bridge. They listened to the step-scruff of the limping fugitive as he reached the span, drawing ever closer. From the edge of the market street on the opposite side, shouts rang through the air. The scuffling run on the bridge picked up pace.

  At the proper moment, as the target reached the end and stepped out on to the street’s cobbles, the two Malazan marines leapt out from their hiding places, converging, each wrapping arms round one of the man’s legs.

  The three went down in a heap.

  Moments later, amidst a flurry of snarled curses, gouging thumbs and frantic kicking, the rest of the hunters arrived, and finally succeeded in pinning down their quarry.

  Bottle edged closer to gaze down at their victim’s bruised, flushed visage. ‘Really, Sergeant, you had to know it was hopeless.’

 
Fiddler glared.

  ‘Look what you did to my nose!’ Stormy said, gripping one of Fiddler’s arms and apparently contemplating breaking it in two.

  ‘You used a smoker in the tavern, didn’t you?’ Bottle asked. ‘What a waste.’

  ‘You’ll all pay for this,’ said Fiddler. ‘You have no idea—’

  ‘He’s probably right,’ said Gesler. ‘So, Fid, we gonna have to hold you down here for ever, or will you come peacefully now? What the Adjunct wants, the Adjunct gets.’

  ‘Easy for you,’ hissed Fiddler. ‘Just look at Bottle there. Does he look happy?’

  Bottle scowled. ‘No, I’m not happy, but orders are orders, Sergeant. You can’t just run away.’

  ‘Wish I’d brought a sharper or two,’ Fiddler said, ‘that would’ve settled it just fine. All right now, you can all let me up—I think my knee’s busted anyway. Gesler, you got a granite jaw, did you know that?’

  ‘And it cuts me a fine profile besides,’ said Gesler.

  ‘We was hunting Fiddler?’ Balm suddenly asked. ‘Gods below, he mutiny or something?’

  Throatslitter patted his sergeant on the shoulder. ‘It’s all right now, Sergeant. Adjunct wants Fiddler to do a reading, that’s all.’

  Bottle winced. That’s all. Sure, nothing to it. I can’t wait.

  They dragged Fiddler to his feet, and wisely held on to the man as they marched him back to the barracks.

  Grey and ghostly, the oblong shape hung beneath the lintel over the dead Azath’s doorway. It looked lifeless, but of course it wasn’t.

  ‘We could throw stones,’ said Sinn. ‘They sleep at night, don’t they?’

  ‘Mostly,’ replied Grub.

  ‘Maybe if we’re quiet.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Sinn fidgeted. ‘Stones?’

  ‘Hit it and they’ll wake up, and then out they’ll come, in a black swarm.’

  ‘I’ve always hated wasps. For as long as I can remember—I must’ve been bad stung once, do you think?’